The sparrows weren’t even thinking about their first fart when Iron Tester, Tony Hill, set off from his Tolaga Bay home base somewhere around 1AM, heading for work in the back of remote Ruatoria on the East Cape.
Around 10am he left his regular job tethered harvesting and set off on a three-and-a-half hour drive to meet us at this Iron Test in the mighty Mangatu Forest.
As for me, after traversing the frost-heaved roads of central Alaska on a recent work trip, I thought I had seen the worst roads in the first world but getting to Forest Pro’s logging site in Moonlight/Mangatu Forest near Gisborne certainly shook that idea out of me. But more about that later.
Luckily the Forest Pro processor operator has a nice new and comfortable John Deere 3756G processor with a long stable track frame to step into after all this driving in dangerous conditions.
Forest Pro has two crews in Mangatu. Its original crew is a classic European-style ground-based logging operation with processing in the cutover and forwarding logs to skids. The crew we are visiting today is its recently established crew based around a near-new John Deere/Harvestline.
The Forest Pro team is really up against it when it comes to road access. The actual forest road is mint and a tribute to the forest roading crew – barely a pothole to be seen despite challenging terrain and geology i.e., Papa mud/rock. It’s the tar seal section supposedly managed by the Gisborne District Council (GDC) that is the problem. Dozens of potholes over 200mm deep have me staggered as to how the log truck companies and loggers are going to get through this abomination without business-destroying levels of vehicle damage. This disaster goes on for many kilometres with no signs warning of safety issues.
Iron Tester, Tony, says this is a common theme in the Gisborne district where the tar seal is rougher and way more destructive to vehicles than the gravel roads because of the sharp edges that the deeper potholes develop on sealed roads: “It’s definitely a safety issue and they develop quickly. I hit a new pothole that was already a foot deep, nearly flipped my truck and bent my wheel rim back past the spokes, so far that it was nearly touching my caliper.”
I tell Forest Pro crew part-owner, Hamish Campbell, it’s the first time I have seen this scenario where the forest roads are miles better than the tar seal.
“The public roads are terrible,” Hamish says. “It’s embarrassing. The GDC seems to be really struggling.”
This writer’s view is that the GDC should be ashamed of itself for such poor support of the region’s main industry. After discussing it with GDC, it saw fit to continue the neglect for months after our visit despite being given several hundred million dollars by taxpayers via central government in September 2024.
Productive days
It is a relief to get off the remains of the tar seal on Armstrong...
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